Dogma

If Ross Douthat, of the New York Times, really wants a potty-mouthed movie that pushes a socially conservative agenda, I’d recommend a viewing of Kevin Smith’s “Clerks II,” which packages explicit Christian message-mongering with lewd phantasmagoria that includes “inter-species erotica.” To Douthat, “Funny People” is

a more realistic morality play…. It’s the first Apatow film in which love doesn’t conquer all. And it’s the first Apatow film in which you get punished for your sins.

It’s hard to reconcile his narrow reading of it with the relationships of the younger comedians (Jason Schwartzman, Jonah Hill, and Aubrey Plaza), young singles whose sexual life is active and unpunished. In Apatow’s seriocomic world, promiscuity is not a problem unless it threatens the bond of trust in a loving relationship; the issue is not with God and his laws but with people and their feelings. It’s worth noting that Apatow’s subject isn’t cheating; it’s comedy, the temperamental peculiarities it arises from, and the odd way of life it imposes on its artists. SPOILER ALERT: The key moment of what Douthat would call the protagonist’s “punishment” has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with humor and distraction. The big-time comedian is both very cynical and very busy, lacking precisely the sentimentality (even if false—listen to Eric Bana’s absurd homilies) and availability (listen to his mea culpas) that make for a proper family man. Apatow’s big funny man can’t fit into a workaday world; as Ed Norton says on “The Honeymooners,” “Why, oh, why was I cursed with this talent?” (If Douthat wants to revise his thesis to extract a Bressonian Jansenism from Apatow’s movie, I’ll read it.)

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